dr. is a longtime friend of fords theatre. in addition to being being an award winning author and lincoln

scholar, he serves on ford theater's advisory council, a group of nationally recognized historians and writers and performing who all share a love of president lincoln and the values he exemplified. when dr. allen guelzo reached out to us about hosting a talk around, the new edition of abraham lincoln redeemer, president just made sense that. it would be here on, this historic stage, a place meant so much to lincoln and where americans come to remember him today. abraham lincoln redeemer president is available for purchase in our gift this evening and immediately following the conversation, dr. delgado will be signing books in the lobby. if you enjoy discourse about lincoln and something tells me that you all do. we invite you to return march 25th for the abraham lincoln

institute symposium pm to learn more and to reserve your free tickets, please visit our website at ww dot forwards dot org. while there are over 60,000 to books and articles and essays written about president abraham lincoln tonight, here to discuss one book in particular. please welcome the stage. alan siegel. also lucas morel and richard brookhiser. we were deliberating before we came on as to who should speak

first. and i said, well, i think i'll lead off, but mainly for the purpose of acknowledging so many friends who are in the audience tonight. some friends that go back to high school days. jay and his son jamie are here. i believe roberta and her husband think are here. joyce and her husband, i think, are also here. and then there are so many other friends, i think bill and elaine here. i know that jeff and cindy are here. joshua and solveig, i think over here. and then, of course, my own family is is here. my wife, deborah, who really deserves all the credit and a credit there, is to be given a place where. and my my son, jonathan and his wife, candace, and their three children, three wonderful grandchildren. there's cori and there's isabel. and then there's. wait for it. patrick lincoln.

russell. also so i'm so delighted that they are here. i'm so delighted you are here and thrown together with with rick brookhiser and with lucas morrell. and here we are, the stage of ford's theater, which, as you can imagine, always conjures up unusual emotion, news and reflections in. my mind, i can never be on this stage or being in this building without always having in my mind the thought, the image of what happened that night. this is a wonderful place. i'm very. to ford's theater, to paul, patricia, to all the staff for so much work that has gone into c-span is here tonight. so i'm very grateful for every preparation that has gone into the of this evening and to do it in this marvelous, this

wonderful role. and and i use the word and this awful place, ford's theater. well, i'll turn now to you two gentlemen. the floor is yours. well, thank you, alan. i'll lead off at washington and lee university. i teach courses in politics, and right now i'm teaching a seminar on abraham lincoln's statesmanship might be the only course on abraham lincoln. statesmanship taught in the united states. but what i tell them is you read a book that has a title or a subtitle, put a mark after it, and that help you be a more engaged. so i'm going to do that with alan's biography. redeemer president. in other words my question, i think it's something of a softball to start us off that we're warmed up here is why did you believe that redeemer president was an apt title for

your life of? lincoln. i'm pretty sure we're going to be talking about lincoln and religion, at least a few times tonight, but to associate lincoln with redemption, can you tell us about that? i chose that as the subtitle. in fact, originally i wanted to be the the front title of it. i wanted the book to be called redeemer of president abraham lincoln. and the ideas americans. but my editor at that point said it would probably be a lot better if abraham lincoln were the first two words because that's what the booksellers look for, the first two words of a title. so there was a perfectly pragmatic reason for for running the title in the way it came out. but the phrase itself, redeemer christian. i use that because walt whitman told me so. well, all right. he sort of did what when whitman was not walt whitman, the poet, he was the editor of a

newspaper, long island, and in exasperation over the the the bland mess and the mistakes of american politics in the 1850s, he wrote editorial in which he asked out, when will we, the president of this republic? now he asks that in 1856, and i'm reading this in a biography. whitman and i'm thinking he had no idea that in four years he was going to get his answer. and so the phrase comes from whitman that way. but there was also a certain irony in using that phrase that i was conscious of, because redeemer president at once associates the notion of a presidency with redemption and this is a religious concept. first of all, you're mixing politics and religion all right, that's fine because it's a book

about ideas. a idea is as much political as. but it sets up a certain irony because abraham lincoln is a man, shall we say of fairly modest religious profile. he never joined a church. he never makes any kind of visible religious profession. he is never baptized. he never takes commune, never any of those things he would attend churches from time to time, but never makes any affiliation or connection with them. and there was something ironic in the idea that this man with this very modern profile, religiously speaking that this man should turn out be an agent of religion, as walt whitman described, i thought was just simply delicious. and i thought, now there's title right there. as soon as i had read that in

whitman, i thought, there's there's the title for the book. so it stands first of all it roots things the crises of the 1850s, but it also up this tension in lincoln's life between a man who is raised in a very religious context with his parents family very deeply committed to an ultra predestined aryan baptist sect. but he grows up in adolescent rebellion against that. he faces in a very different. he becomes a devotee of tom paine. he becomes in some what some people called an infidel as a 20 something. and yet is someone who, by the time we hear him speak as president, is going to speak as no other american president has spoken about god, about purpose, about destiny, about what the

future of america is in the larger cause makes sense. and when he comes to deliver his second inaugural address, he invokes the bible he invokes providential of god's control of events that are just an utter break from anything which has gone before in terms of presidential rhetoric and in truth, we have never seen such. so the ironies multiply. and i thought that redeemer president would capture the subtlety of those ironies probably than any other title i could dream of. i'm sure we're going to get back the second inaugural a lot. i imagine we all agree that it's as greatest speech by far. but i want to ask a much simpler question when you started

digging into lincoln, what surprised you the. almost everything. i had been and know i don't know if i would call it a student, maybe even a fan. but i had been interested in lincoln really from from very early on. i think i first bitten by a lincoln when i was in second grade. i was journeying with my to chicago and we were in the train, the great train station in philadelphia, which has since gone. and there i begged, whined and wheedled until she bought me a comic book biography of lincoln. that was my introduction to abraham lincoln. it was a very good comic book, i have to say that. and from that, i always had a certain degree of interest in

lincoln when i was in high school as a senior in government class, i wrote my government senior government thesis on lincoln's nomination to the presidency in 1860 and as a senior in high school, the director of our orchestra decided program, aaron copland's lincoln, and had me serve as the narrator. so here i am, this 18 year old, and i'm taking on i'm taking on writing about lincoln's nomination and narrating lincoln's portrait. so, all right, i had some some nodding acquaintance with with lincoln that way, although i never really thought of myself as a student of lincoln when finally turned my attention to studying history and i was a graduate student when i was really interested in was was american intellectual history, the history of american so that my my day was written about century moral philosophy not exactly the kind of subject line

up to hear about, but. all right. 18th century moral law. and that's really where i thought i was going to camp out in writing american philosophy. but at one point, i was working on a book that, was going to be a book about the idea of the term in ism in modern american thought modern. in other words, from about 1800s of the present and, i remembered that lincoln had had things to say on this subject of determinism. they've talked about fatalism. and i thought, wouldn't it just be absolutely, fiendishly clever me to bring into book about 19th century and 20th century american philosophy. abraham lincoln as a walk on character. so went to work on this one particular idea about lincoln and determined this and i that was my first surprise that there was much more there than. i had realized and as i began

unearthing all the lines of thought that way, i was struck very by the fact that here was a man who had what we would regard as only most primitive shreds of formal. i mean, add it all up when it comes to less than a year but who nevertheless had this extraordinary intellectual curiosity, who read such an extraordinary variety of things and by virtue of possessing a well-nigh photographic memory retained it all and could talk it. now, don't often think about lincoln as being a man of ideas. we think of him as being a politician and sometimes we think of him as being a lawyer. but especially we think of him as being a politician. and we don't usually think of politicians as being people of ideas. maybe that says something about our politicians. so it is a surprise when you find lincoln talking in a very sophisticated way about a

doctrine of necessity. what does that mean? where does he get this from? what are the sources? what has he been reading? and then you start to push still further on this and you find such as in john diary when hay is a secretary to lincoln in the house and hay writes in his diary had a little talk with the tea. he used the word the letter t for lincoln that was an abbreviation of. the tycoon. that what they called lincoln behind his back. they had names for mary lincoln, too, that were much less complimentary. and the hellcat was one of them. ooh. ouch. but the t had a had a talk with t this evening on phil, for which he has a little studied interest, which he didn't have much time to devote to

philology. if i were to take 99 out of 100 people off sidewalk and ask them what philology was, i probably wouldn't get a very clear answer. he was a structure of languages. he's interested in this when the republican national committee was working on developing campaign biographies of lincoln in 1860. they hired james clay howard to come out to illinois and interview people and get testimony. they talked to john todd stewart, who had been his first partner in law. and stewart said lincoln has a very deep interest in geology. what so? so what? it turned out was that the more i pushed into the subject of lincoln, the more i began to find that here was someone who had his finger on the currents of almost every important intellectual discourse. of the american 19th century. and yet never said. and yet this is the the mental

environment in which this man flourishes. this is what describes the mental geography of lincoln, which i've was simply astonishing. i would never, never have dreamt of this. and there it was. and there was all the evidence that i was uncovering. so this. i never did finish that book. on determinism in american. and i'm i've got to i've got five boxes full of cards on it but i'm sorry i will never get to them and i don't think anyone here is sorry about that. but i wrote a paper about lincoln and his doctrine of necessity was invited to give it at the meeting of the abraham lincoln association in springfield. read it and response was was really quite unusual.

and then an editor sherman's tonight we a banner behind us from who publishes abraham redeemer president and that from erdman got in touch with me and said, well, would you interested in writing a religious biography, lincoln? because there was a series that urban's published the library of religious biography. and i listened and i said, no because i was aware they were. there are a number of books on lincoln and religion and they tended to be pleadings of various sorts. it was a book by a swedenborg and claiming that lincoln a suite and boardroom. there's a book by a baptist claiming lincoln was a baptist book. but. well, you know how it goes. and i thought, i really don't want to join that. then he called me back. he said, we'd really like you to do a book on lincoln and religion. i said, no. then a friend of mine had been important by this editor.

he called me and said, we really like you to do this book on lincoln and religion. and i said, not a chance. finally, the editor called me back and said, look, if you don't do this, we're going to get so-and-so to do it. so and and i knew not any of the gentlemen here. i knew professor so-and-so. i thought, oh, no, no, no. so i said, all right, look, look, i'm going to make you a deal. you can't refuse. okay. there's great shades. of the godfather. well, i'm a grandfather, but great. so that's close. i said, look, let me write a book about lincoln and ideas and intellectual biography of lincoln, of which religion be a part. but let me let me widen the scope of it. the editor was agreeable and that's happened. so it was it was a matter of, in a sense, getting my hand in the lincoln and cookie jar and being

able to get it out and always finding more about lincoln to push on and surprise upon. surprise upon surprise. the more i pushed and you know, after all these years, surprises haven't stopped. i keep being surprised by lincoln. i keep being surprised by the man and by his environment. i keep finding new to think about to write about and talk about. and the the well of lincoln any honor just sometimes seems to be downright inexhaustible. the man is a source of extraordinary fascination. and i've devoted so much time to him and have not regret a single minute of it. it sounds a little bit like like herndon doing his interviews and realizing, gee, i worked with this guy for 16 years and i didn't know any of this stuff.

oh, yes. i resonated with with herndon way, especially when wilson and ron davis produced remarkable volume in 1998, fall of 1998, herndon's informants, which was a marvelous, comprehensive edition of herndon's interviews and yes, what really floated right the surface was herndon surprised i worked with this man all these years and hears aspects of him i never knew i liked. joke true to rod and to jog that they were responsible for ruining my children's christmas. 1998 because that book came out just at the beginning, the christmas season. i got a copy of the book and i spent that whole season reading that book and my children have forgiven me for. but yes herndon and herndon

herndon's discoveries because you know, in a lot of ways, lincoln. lincoln tried hard to keep things some aspects of his life very, very secret. he never liked to talk about upbringing. i remember being by a letter that charles ray was an editor of the chicago tribune, wrote to lincoln at time of the lincoln-douglas debates, and ray wrote to him, said, i have the suspicion that abraham lincoln was not born with a silver spoon in his mouth. now we all will sit here and. wow, that, of course. yes, that's right. we all know that charles ray wasn't sure. lincoln in 1858. is lincoln the successful lawyer? he has been member of congress. he come with an an ace of, the greatest upset in american political history, meaning the against stephen douglass. and yet here was the editor.

one of the coeditors actually the chicago tribune scratching his head and not particularly sure know what would you have background like when lincoln had to fill out a form for lanham charles lanham. dictionary biographical dictionary of congress. lanham supplied every member living member of congress with a blank that you had to fill out. you know, education, profession, things like that. lincoln was a very re tight lipped in filling it out in the line for education. lincoln used one word defective. so he was you know he he guards very carefully he guards very carefully his his past. one of his neighbors, a baptist minister named noyes minor, tried to push a little bit, try to find out some more. wanted lincoln talk about. well, what was it like when you were growing up? what was it like when wherever

it was you came from? and lincoln responded to him and said, i have seen a great deal of the backsides of the world was we think today that that pioneer image of born in the log raised on the front. we think that that is somehow a romantic advantage. lincoln didn't think so. he saw it as. the environment he grew up in was something to be ashamed of. he when he would talk a little bit about his growing up, it usually wasn't very complimentary terms, especially about his relationship with his father. he once described as he once described his as as being only barely literate. and the phrase to use was his father knew how to bungling sign his own name public, which doesn't really sound like a compliment. that's not the kind of thing you'd find on a father's day

card. so he's he's at pains for people not to pry closely into their past. he's not proud of it. one of the things herndon discovered, he was doing all those interviews is that these people really, really were backward rubes. and one of them, one of his cousins, in fact, said that one of the prevailing songs of the day had been a parody of, you know, hale columbia, happy land, famous song of the time. but except it ran in the parody form. hale columbia happy land. if you ain't drunk, i will be --. and that more or less captured lincoln's of how he had grown up. he was not proud of that. he wanted to put as much distance as he could between him and his past. and that frequently made it very difficult to push on lincoln.

that also meant that lot of people misjudged lincoln. when you met lincoln for the first time, you would what? caleb carman, one of the people who was interviewed by herndon, said you would meet what you took to be a rough farmer. and that meant that in a courtroom another who didn't know, lincoln would immediately be judged that what he was being asked challenge was some some country don't. and one lawyer who practiced law with lincoln out on the old days circuit for many years leonard said about lincoln of the things i think is probably the most accurate description about lincoln ever written, he said. anybody who took abe lincoln for a simple minded man would soon wake up with his back in a ditch. there were lot of people in that

ditch in the 1860s. so is full of surprises. but that's because in his own day, he was full of surprises for people then to. so let's take something that's not surprising about. lincoln is known course as the preserver and the savior of the union. and of course the great emancipator. think he can still be called that but that's contested many quarters. but he of course has set an unsurpassed standard for political oratory. i don't think anybody even comes close knowing that tackling the life of lincoln, a biography. how did you approach the topic of lincoln's oratory? how did you try to showcase case the genius of the mind behind words that you really pay attention to them? aren't highfalutin very. how did you get at that in mind the ideas that fed into lincoln

as an orator? well, look at what is probably his most famous utterance, the gettysburg address, it's 272 words, long and it's uttered after all those people, some 15,000 people. and then in the soldiers national cemetery, i just listened for two and a half hours to. edward everett two and a half hours worth of. extraordinary class, vocal oratory and no one afterwards could remember a single word of. it. and lincoln stands up and speaks for two and a half minutes. and as charles sumner said, lincoln could not have more wrong when he said the world will. little note long remember what we say here. sumner said, oh, no, no. the world will always know and will always remember what said here. what lincoln said of gettysburg was more important than the battle itself. 272 words. 190 of those words are single

syllable. and did it a wisdom, winston churchill, that that that short are the best words to communicate, and the shorter and the more, the more short words are, the better. and lincoln has a grasp of that. because what lincoln wants do is to communicate with people. there are really two eras of lincoln's oratory here. there is there an era from the first time he begins to speak in public in the 1830s until he comes from his sole term in congress. in 1849 and the lincoln, that oratory is is a very standard unsurprising lincoln terms of comparing him to other politicians. it's it's the orator of attack and slash it's the oratory of score points. it's the oratory of sensation or zingers.

and it's not really all that remarkable bull. there's there's very little that you pull from lincoln in those years. and you say. well, isn't that fantastic? and then comes 1854. the councils, nebraska actually galvanized into political life and then suddenly you're hearing an entirely different lincoln. and i think two years, two things have have happened that have produced a great change in lincoln's oratory. one is he has become more and more comfortable sophisticated and successful as lawyer. and remember this man as a trial lawyer. he's not a wilson person. he is not a corporation person, doesn't sit in a desk and get papers in the inbox to the outfox. he's a trial lawyer and. he earns his keep by standing in front juries and persuading them. and he has to do this in the hardest environment you can imagine, because out on the eighth, judicial circuit, he's going from one little lonely

country courthouse to another on sometimes as many as 14 of them on a single circuit. and he's speaking and i've been a number of these. and you've been in these courthouses. do you remember the courthouse in mount pulaski? not right up there. all well, anyway, that's that's probably the venue, right. the courthouse and mine for a lot of people aski is a real classic because it is completely unchanged from day. you can walk in there and see it as would have seen it. and the great thing about these little courthouses were that you really had only had one courtroom and all the cases that were going to be heard on county day all had to line up there in that courtroom and a jury would have to be impaneled and the lawyers would have to handle case case situation at the situation there was a real grueling event. but it also meant you had to be super quick on your feet. you had to be a quick study to

master the intricacies of case after case after case. then you had to turn around and to a jury of ordinary people, in many cases, a jury that had just been from farmers and clerks and whatnot, standing in the back of the courtroom. and you had to persuade them. and if you didn't if you didn't connect them in the first five or 10 minutes, you weren't you weren't going to persuade anyone way. he learned how to persuade people and by the time we move into the 1850s, he's become a master of persuading people of being able to take a problem, a situation and an idea. boil it down into a couple of lapidary sentences that just make it totally clear to everyone. well the situation is he becomes extreme only good at that and he's forced do that because if he doesn't, he's not going to have much of a future as a lawyer.

so very good at that. now that gets harnessed to a new kind of earnestness after 1854, an earnestness out of the urgency he feels that the slave power is about to extend its tentacles. first to control the territories. and then, as he makes clear in the house divided speech to extend tentacles into the free states and always at the back of the mind there is this haunting demand of one haughty southern that he looked forward one day to a slave auction being held at the foot, the bunker hill monument. now we would look back and say, oh, that's so remote. that's such baseless fear. not in 1858. not in 1859. and that puts the fire into lincoln. so when you read that and put

that with this man's persuader of powers, that's where you begin to see the genius of the oratory blossom. and you see in his first inaugural address, you see it in the plaintive ness of his plea. in conclusion, we are not enemies, friends. we must not be enemies. the mystic chords, memory. there's perhaps a third and that illustrates perhaps a third source feeding this that is love of theater. he had a great admiration for shakespeare quote chunks of shakespeare year off by memory. all had to do was to just get him going. and there is a certain of of the theatrical in lincoln as frankly i suspect is element of theatrical in every good trial and in that theatrical aspect of

him. but being able to build a sense of drama once again that makes him an extraordinarily speaker. so that concision of expression matched with the fervency, the passion of the motivation given to him by his situation with that that sense, that timing of the theatrical that makes him a power to be reckoned with as an orator. you see it dramatically for the first time in the lincoln-douglas debates. stephen douglass believes he can go into these and he can just bowl lincoln the audiences over. he can shake that dark hair, a head of hair like a lion's mane. he can his fist and pound his feet. and that will persuade everyone. and instead, lincoln gets. and lincoln starts to work on people's logic.

one observer of the lincoln-douglas debates that if you listened, if you listened to douglass for 5 minutes, you were totally won over by him. you couldn't help but be. but if you listen to lincoln for 15 minutes, he would get the logical hook in your mouth. he would just reel you in. that was lincoln. now, the funny thing is, when you when you reflect on the way people described lincoln as a speaker, douglass douglass was an big, deep opera voice. he could have been polyandry. lincoln lincoln speaks with a high tenor voice very, very sharp. also very penetrating. so that a crowd of 10,000 people could hear him without difficulty. and he spoke with this thick border ax. frederick law was taken aback

when visited lincoln and the white house that lincoln would reply about something saying, i heard of that. and olmstead, i mean, almost a of the elite. and this is the man who designed park. all right. olmstead wanted to scratch his head. where did they get this guy? after. after lincoln's election, one editor wrote, this is one of my favorite lines, because this is so wrong. one editor wrote in, in frustration after lincoln's election who will write this ignorant man state papers for him. who know lincoln was quite capable of communicating, he might have that high piercing voice. he might have that thick accent. but what he said persuaded and persuasion is the key. everything that he does, as an

orator and how good he is at. i think the classic example is in a letter, a public letter that. he writes, this is the warning letter. and in it, he is talking about civil liberties questions. he's talking about the arrest of clement and verlander for a posing the new orleans draft military conscription. and he asks this question, must i a simple soldier boy who deserts? but not touch a hair of the agitator who induces him to desert? and soon as he put it in those terms, it was. oh, yeah, common sense. lincoln's capacity is to persuade, i think, the key to his oratory. so he would not have been the kind of speaker you would go to, to listen to oral music, so to speak. but he would be the kind of person who would persuade you of a case because he could right to the heart of it. he would see exactly what the

issues and he would go to work convinced you of his way of seeing it. and that was real oratory or persuasion. makes me think of of another persuasive who you really hammer pretty hard in your book. and that's jefferson and you all you all but say that that lincoln's use of the declaration from 1854 through the gettysburg address is calculated you know, quite cynical. but you say it's calculated, but don't you think there could be more of an affinity because great writers like great writing lincoln and certainly jefferson as you know jefferson's prose and its own way is as persuasive as lincoln's he is. jefferson is a great and not on the declaration. if you look at the documents,

even the documents that before them, the so the 1775 reasons for the separation of british america and you read in in jefferson central logic and especially such passion and even and even in jefferson's letters the clarity of the thought and the ideas that is there and then his his inaugural address when he makes this offer, we are all republicans. we all federalists fighting on the night. yeah. fire the night. we have the wolf by the ears and cannot let him go. he had a wonderful gift for imagery that way. i don't know that people were entirely bowled him by him as a speaker. people who knew jefferson, who interacted with. jefferson said that he tended to be something on the shy side as a talker and not terribly interesting to listen to as a talker, but as a great writer, as as a wordsmith, as a huntsmen

of words. i mean, jefferson certainly stands out in american politics and, i think in large measure, it was that that lincoln admire. he found in the this statement in the very opening of the declaration of principles that resonate with lincoln's own experience and found in the words of jefferson what he called the axioms of liberty. in other words, not the things you you could demonstrate, things that just were true in and of themselves and from which, like a geometrical theorem, you would then deduce certain conclusions. and yet was also an aspect of jefferson that. he. because he found in jefferson a great detachment between. the jefferson of the ideas and writing and the jefferson his

personal practice that he found, especially in the stories about sally hemings, about slave ownership. he found these kinds things in jefferson to be absolutely reprehensible. what lincoln could not abide were people who talked the talk but did not walk the, walk. and to him. jefferson was probably the most agony example of that. the someone could pitch the principles of the american republic at such a high level. and yet the practice of his life be at such a low level that appalled and although he never will come out publicly and say, i'm going to stand in criticism. thomas jefferson, in fact, when does talk publicly on one occasion about jefferson. this is the letter he writes to edward pearson, 59. this is where we all talk about jefferson as the one who is the author of these great ideas but it's privately when he's talking

to herndon he's talking to others when in fact he writes probably an editorial, an unsigned editorial for the mccomb eagle in. 1840s and is sharply critical of jefferson. the hypocrite. now, why would lincoln be that hard on jefferson? probably. i think it's because lincoln really embraced the high. and what he found reprehensible jefferson was that the low level of conduct would bring those high ideals into disgrace, would discredit them in the eyes of others, that people could always say, oh yeah, jefferson had great things to say in the declaration of independence. but look at how he lived and that means we should discount what he said on the declaration. lincoln always strove to be the man who talked lived at the same

and on the same level. and in very large measure, he was. that was what he found with in thomas jefferson that the ideas, the words were great compel lying convincing but the life the life then raised the as to whether those words really had substance. and that becomes a theme that lincoln developed, not just about jefferson, but about the very presence of slavery in the republic in the great peoria of october, 1854. which i think is one of the greatest speeches. lincoln ever delivers. i think if we lost everything else that lincoln had written or said by by some strange alchemy, all of that disappeared, and left only the peoria speech, you would still have all of lincoln's principal is right there in. that speech he talks about slavery and what it means why he

finds it so represent symbol. and one of the things he focuses on is that the presence of slavery in the republic gives the critics the enemies of liberty, of free society, self-government. it gives them a ground on which to say they don't really mean it. it doesn't really work. and and in fact this was true because what lincoln was referring to was an article he'd read in an english newspaper raising exactly this issue. how can we take seriously what these americans talking about when they talk about life and the pursuit of happiness? when they're not really practicing it for 4 million of their fellow human beings. and this was, in fact, a theme in commentary abroad on the american republic. samuel johnson at the time of the american revolution, he says, why is it that we hear the loudest yelps liberty from the drivers of slaves and?

in 1820, sidney smith and in a famous article in the edinburgh, says the americans have great ideas. the problem is the ideas have no substance and proof that they have no substance is that all the people who talking about liberty also turn out to be the of slaves. how can we take them seriously? and lincoln at lincoln stung by this. so when he encounter his jefferson, it's that he has any lack of confidence in the ideas that jefferson articulates. it's the jefferson doesn't live up to them and a way for lincoln that is the problem of the american republic itself. so we have our articulated these great ideas. are we able to live up to them? and that really becomes the theme of his presidency. and in many respects, i think that's the theme of, the legacy that lincoln hands down to us

are. these principles that we talk about is this this creed, what he called a proper to which we are dedicated. are we really capable living up to it? he thought the war was the acid test for that. in may of 1861, he said to john this war is going to prove one way or the other. i'm paraphrasing lincoln here. this war is going to prove one way or the other whether people are capable of self-government or the first time we come face to face with a large scale problem. we're all going to go to pieces. and if we all go to pieces, then what we have shown to all the aristocrats, all the dukes and the counts and the dictators and the czars, what we have shown to is that they are right right. and there's an odd echo of that, even someone like otto von bismarck. and bismarck says to karl schertz, when schertz was

visiting germany in the age and seven days after having been in exile from germany for many years, bismarck says to. schertz, you know, when i when i was a young man like you, i was a republican. i wanted a republic. but came to understand that the only way for a nation to become great, for a to become great, was the monarchy principle. it has to be the aristocracy telling people what to do and fashioning their future by a so-called blood. by blood and iron. lincoln says what the civil war is going show to us is whether people like that are right. and so at gettysburg, he talks about the great civil war is testing whether this nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. i think he handles that challenge. every generation of americans not just those living at gettysburg i think and to every

generation. and i think it's handed to our generation as well to show whether those jeffersonian and lincoln and principles can still be lived whether human beings are capable of governing themselves. i think that's the real issue. we're the middle of what some people have called a history wars. now, how it that we should think about in particular in america, how we should think about our past and what for the longest time, although this is now contested for the longest, we called the founding rite the era of the spirit of 76, as lincoln called it, lincoln in all of my reading, never speaks of the founders as hypocrites, never. he's he uses the word hypocrisy in some other contexts, but he never on my reading refers to

the founders as hypocrites even though in his many references to the founders, he also makes many references to slaveholding. so what's going on there? why it that lincoln well knows what you recounted about one of the founders being true with other founders. how do we explain this why does lincoln turn our gaze away from those imperfect actions? why does he turn the public's gaze towards the things that he thinks. are more worthy of our attention going on there? well, here's the moment when lincoln raised in this very religious a religion, he puts a good deal of distance between himself and it. it's where that comes right back into hands as an argument, he talks about the founders he says

of them laying out these marvelous ideas in the declaration. and he says, we have to understand that these are aspirations. this is the word he. these are aspirations. and he compares it to what this passage in the gospels. and he says what we read in the gospels is be perfect, as your father in heaven is perfect. now, lincoln says, we know that we are not perfect, but what we being encouraged to do is to work towards that as a goal. we are going to try to be as perfect as we can be in our behavior so that what the savior lays out. lincoln what the savior lays out is an aspira to which we strive. his his understanding of founders is governed by that same principle that the founders lay out an aspiration vision which we are going to

continually work towards, which we are going to continually struggle to realize. and we're struggling to do that in the 1850s and the 1860s, struggling to push forward that way. but we're doing it not because the founding principles were wrong or because even to behave to the founders is somehow a refutation of those principles. it's because we understood from the very beginning to lay out these principles about life, about liberty, the pursuit of happiness, which to lay out an object, a goal to which were going to work. so, yes, we do start out at some position of imperfection, but we're conscious of it as imperfection. we don't try to to defend imperfection. we don't try to protect it. we recognize it. and as an imperfection and promise to ourselves, we are going to work to rise above it. he compared it in another

environment, in a more lethal way to cancer. he talked about slavery being like someone had seen on a train, a man with a on his face who had his collar turned up because. he really didn't want everybody to see this disfigured tumor. and lincoln said it's it's that way with slavery. the founder is understood that slavery was tumor and it embarrassed them but they also knew that if you took a knife and tried to slice the tumor, the patient would probably to death on the spot. so what do you do? do you try to work on situation as medicine will allow you to to work on it? try to aspire to health and you recognize you can't take an immediate transformation and make that happen without sacrificing the life of the

patient. he gives you a clearer of how he wants to explain this in great cooper institute speech. and rick, you've, i think some of the very best that's been written about the cooper institute speech. and in it he says let's take a look at the founders generation doesn't actually use the word founders but this is what he means. he looks at the people who were part of the constitutional convention and especially he looks at the people who were of the first congress who passed the northwest ordinance, which banned slavery in the northwest territory. he says, look, let's let's look at the people who were part of that congress. see how many them actually lined up to. endorse the idea of banning in the northwest territory, even though they themselves might have owned slaves. they're in a position they realize they want to get to this other. they are working toward that. lincoln's counsel is respect that. let them work toward it because

if we will work toward that, then we will get there. what found happening in his day was that people had stopped being embarrassed about slavery, that people had started defender it as a positive good that people like john pettit of indiana had declared that the declaration of independence and the idea that all men are created equal was a positive lie. he said we have just in the space of a few we have moved a position that, said, here is the declaration of independence and we are moving towards the goals that the declaration lays out. we have now moved in just a few years to a position where we're now saying that was all wrong. and lincoln looks at this and says, if we are going to that, what was in the declaration was wrong, then the whole american experiment has been from nothing. it has been a big mistake.

do we believe that? do really think that that was a mistake? do we really that people are not capable of governing themselves but instead are born to be ridden with shadows on their backs, as jefferson said? no no, we know that we have a different goal as americans, and we must put by the voices are telling us, no, it was american experiment was all wrong. whether voices or the voices of slaves, elders trying to defend slavery, or the voices of monarchs abroad, he says it really doesn't matter. should this, in the debates of douglass and the very last of the debates, he said, it's the same spirit. it's the same spirit between kings and slaveholder is the same spirit that says, you and work and earn bread and i'll eat it. and lincoln says, whether that comes from the mouth of a king

who seeks to destroy the people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor or from one race of man as an apology enslaving another race. it is the same tyrannical principle. we cannot recede from the declaration we must pursue it. it holds up goal and it is a goal which just a fantasy land. either it is a goal which captures natural law because. what are those goals from the declaration about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, inalienable rights? they are certain self-care evident truths. there's so much truth is that you don't have to explain them. that's why they're so evident soon as people see them. soon as people hear in them, they know that are true. and true everywhere. everywhere around the globe. in july of 1858, at the very beginning of the campaign between, lincoln and douglass, he gives this marvelous speech

in chicago july 10th, 1858, and he says, if the american republic is simply built from the fact that we have this against another country and we just want it to be different from another country, that was all that was involved then. nobody today would understand what the united states was about because most of the people in the united states today, today, meaning 1858, were they were the born in some other and came here as immigrants or elsewhere the offspring of those were immigrants. they had gotten a personal connection. the american revolution. now you try to invoke the shade of nathaniel green or of george washington, right? just a historical figure. but lincoln said the american experiment is about more than that. the american experiment is about those truths, the declaration that are true every for everyone, as matters natural

right and natural law, which everyone sees and acknowledge, choose so that even if you talk to a new immigrant from, as he says, germany, scandinavia, france even if you talk to a new immigrant, the children of immigrants and you talk to them about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, about all men being created equal. they know at once that that is true. they resonate with that. they hear those words. and lincoln said they feel that. they are flesh of the flesh and blood of the blood of those old men that wrote the declaration. and so they are because those words are the electric core. and the electric, which is before people have invented appliances to plug. those words, the electric cord that unite every lover of liberty. and for lincoln, that's not just

jefferson's words. it's not just proposition of a virginian from the 18th century. those words that describe what is true, what is in the heart and in the mind of every human being and which we should aspire to. and anything less than that is to fall away, not just from example of the revolution. it's to fall away from what is naturally and morally right. so, yes, we aspire to it. do we fall short of it? sure we do. but aspire to it in the same way that we seek to be perfect as your father in heaven, as perfect you started off by saying that. well, what an irony. it was that this man who rebelled against this youthful religion becomes by the time he's president the most religious president we had ever had and have ever had since.

and and you said the second inaugural in particular is an instance of this. and i think it's like late it's just almost another in another world. even from his other speeches great though they are. but i have a couple problems with it and i want to raise one. this is lincoln basically describing every thing he's describing in american history. it's his 1619 project, you know, 250 years of unrequited toil at 1615 with quotes. and now he's he's explaining why we had to have this war, why it came upon us to pay off all that national sin. and then he's describing what we have to do to be better, you know to to to go forward and to not be like that anymore. but there are no black people in it.

you the only they they appear as the barmen. you know the two who toiled for 250 years and implicit in their backs were the ones that were but and has spoken about black people before and his speeches i mean maybe not a but regularly he talks about the black woman who has the right to earn the bread that she makes with her hands as much as men are judged on this or any man. and then he has running joke about there are enough black men to marry all the black women. so let be married. and that's to rebut the democratic charge that republicans just race, mixed race and then a couple of weeks later, he's going to give the last speech of his life. and he's to say, you know, maybe maybe blacks and very intelligent black men should vote in louisiana. you know, so he does. he is aware of black people. there is, mind in there in his speeches. but in this speech where he's really with everything. oh, yes. there's also god in the speech.

so it's not it's not just humans in human history, you know, it is the almighty is one of the characters. but why does he why are black there only as occasion for white sin. because at the time of the second inaugural, the real fear he had was how whites were going to behave. he didn't lack a lot of confidence in what he thought the future for black people was going to be. and that's something that he makes clear not only in that last speech on april 11th, but it's what he makes clear in a number of comments that he makes, for instance, to his staffer, william stoddart, when he sends starter out to supervise reconstruction in arkansas. he says make sure the vote gets into the of the freed people because that's going to be the most important lever for them for the future. he will write instructions for

his generals in command on the occupied carolina coast, telling them, if freed slave are in possession, it means occupation of the land of their respect, that let them farm it, let them get an income from it. all right. they may not have. all the proper papers filed in the local courthouse that's neither here nor there. they have, in a sense, earned that right, he says. and the soldiers who are the occupying forces must protect that. so he's looking to a future in which he is seeing black people as a americans, as citizens on an equal basis with everyone else. in fact, he says he's in richmond making that that last visit of his life. he says you shall have all the rights that everyone else has. and anyone who tries to tell you that you don't show them the

sword and the bayonet, which is pretty frank. i think that if lincoln had lived and that's probably the question that i think i'm asking the most and talking lincoln, what would have happened if lincoln had lived? i think there's a few things that are fairly clear. lincoln would have gone for the vote definitely, because the vote the vote would have been important, not just for for black people. it also would have been important for the future of the republican party, because at the end of the war, you know, the southern states, which have been largely democratic are going to come back into the union, they're going to elect democrat representatives. how are you going to keep them from seizing control of congress? you can only do that by enfranchising black people. so there's a practical aspect to it. but i think also he was thinking in terms of economic leverage and that is what's connected to land ownership. i think there's a there's a

curious way in which even the homestead act of 1862 plays a role. this way. he sees this as a future. he's thinking a lot about the west as a possible home for freed slaves. but but he's he's thinking in terms of a new way, talking about citizenship. in a letter that he writes to general james wadsworth in january of 1864. and i know there's been question about the wadsworth letter, but but in it he is very clear. he says if the southerners expect to be welcomed back the union, there's going to have to be a price for it in the price for it is definitely going to have to be the vote. you can't you can't keep the vote out of the hands of the freed slaves. he and he had some directions. he wanted to move that i think can be fairly discern and as the possibility as he would have explored had he lived. but that's not really is worrying him in the second inaugural. what's worrying him in the second inaugural is how white people are responding. and in this case, curiously, his

own party, his own friends, his own supporters at lincoln. lincoln loved democracy. he said over and over that, you know, self-government, that is that's the system of justice. but he was also aware of the possibility of democracy's deficits. the democracy makes mistakes from time, time. i think that's what's work in the famous temperance address in 1842, because he's worried that people can drink away through vice, through bad habits, the advantages that that that democracy confers upon. how can you talk about self-government if you're not in control of yourself? he's also worried about when he gives a peoria because he's worried about democracy's being sullied by slavery. he's worried about democracy in the gettysburg address and the

great thing that gettysburg does for lincoln is to give him the sense that people there's 3500 union dead, buried in the cemetery. they have just defined by their sacrifice so much of what democracy means the european monarchies had looked upon the ordinary man as scum and and you find this in european that you know there's that this poem by heinrich heine. you know where shall we go now? where hina says, you know, i, i think i'll leave germany. i think i'll go to that. the great big pig pen of freedom called, america, where all these louts boors live in freedom. and that was not a compliment. and you read dickens you know and martin struggle with where dickens just unsparing on his image of americans is just it's just a bunch of creeps.

and lincoln looks over that crowd the cemetery over those semi-circular rows of graves and he says, here are ordinary people who gave everything they had to give in defense of democracy. there is something transcending there. there is a rainbow. there. but what worried him at the end of the war was that there was another democracy could be destabilized. that was by vengeance, because vengeance is is incompatible with democracy as loss of self-control, as enslavement. vengeance has no role in a democracy. and that is why in the second inaugural, he's really speaking to his own people. he's saying to them, look what has happened in the civil. it's not time for a victory lap. it's not time for us to beat our breast and say, see how righteous we were.

god has justified us by giving us victory. now time to put our boot on the neck of those southerners slave holders and lincolns comment is, no, no, no, no, no. no. both north and south americans as a whole over 250 years, bear the burden and the responsibility for slavery. we have all had our hands on toilet. and it's because of that that god's justice has been manifest in a war to north and south alike. and anyone who wants to object to that and say, no, no, no we were the right party, we were the good guys. lincoln drops back, says, well, this is what god says, and not the judge of all the earth do right. it was a little tongue in cheek, but it was not more tongue in

cheek than a similar comment he makes to douglass when when douglass is trying to quote scripture to him and lincoln backs off and says yes, i have a contrary scripture from a higher authority, quoting gospel. and lincoln does something of the same thing in the second inaugural. and having checked that, that third seat for vengeance he says what is the real way forward when acknowledge that we all bear a part in this sin that will lead us to have charity for all and malice toward none. it will lead us to take up the burden of the widow and the orphan. it will lead us to seek peace, lasting peace with ourselves and with all nations. he not see. perhaps he would have had he

lived. he does not see and march 1865 that the real threat, the real vengeance was going to come not overenthusiastic northerners but from truculent and undefeated southerners who invent a lost cause mythology to justify what amounts to a practical re enslavement of the slave. lincoln see that. good evening. i'm robert george and i am the former professor of jurisprudence and director of the james madison in american ideals and institutions at princeton university. the lead sponsor of tonight's program and it's my happy duty to thank our distinguished

panelists for an outstanding presentation and discussion every now then. i have a good idea. and one of the best that i ever had was to move allen guelzo gettysburg college to princeton, where you see our thomas w smith research scholar. and how great it is to have such eminent scholars as rick brookhiser r and lucas morel to enter into conversation with allen. please join me in thanking lucas and. special thanks to the people who work so hard to give us this evening. i want to specially acknowledge my program manager at the madison program, parker, who really did the lion's share of the work in putting this together. i want to thank tricia and alex, erica and the ford's theater

staff and ford's for giving us such a wonderful venue for this event. and i want to thank our co-sponsors the ethics and public policy center here in washington, d.c., under the great leadership of ryan anderson, the american enterprise institute. great leader robert doar is with us tonight with yuval levin, the lincoln group of the district, columbia, the school of public affairs of american university. and i'm that tom merrill, who's the leader there is joining us. and i want to thank all of you for coming out for such a special event. alan and rick and lucas all managed to remind us that lincoln challenges every generation of americans and he's certainly challenges this generation. this is a generation our generation live at a time of deep division, deep, polarized. so lincoln challenges us to deal with that in a republican way in a way fitting for a self people but he does more challenge us as

alan reminded us at the very end. he also shows us the way to meet the challenge. so let's go forward with malice toward none, with charity for with firmness in the right. as god gives us to see the right. good evening, everyone. so the abraham lincoln presidential library museum